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A metaphor, a hack, a ladder: On the difficulty of telling yourself the truth
I wrote a couple of pieces for apolitical a few years ago, but didn’t persevere. I then got an invitation to discuss my experience with the inevitable internal review and had a good discussion. Saying...
View ArticleThe David Solomon Lecture: Government 2.0 a couple of years on . . .
Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo, I’ve reposted it here for the record. I’m a bit embarrassed by my wooden speaking style. Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at...
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What kind of Character is Sam Bankman-Fried
A friend sent me this article documenting Sam Bankman-Fried’s now well known text exchange with Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. I couldn’t help but think of Alasdair MacIntyre’s characters. As MacIntyre...
View ArticleThe Fertility Rate: the Best Dam(n) Wellbeing Index Going Around?
Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has...
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Fighting political polarisation
1"> 1">From this week’s Substack of mine. 1">Thomas B. Edsall has an important writeup of research into reducing political polarisation. But to me it seems to be heading in an unhelpfully...
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The off-ramp from reality
This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking....
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I have seen the off-ramp and it works
From my Substack newsletter. Extraordinary images are being detected within the early pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. As you know, the JWST went in search of exoplanets. Anyway at...
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The unbearable lightness of grey academia: note to self
Wikipedia defines ‘grey literature’ thus: Materials and research produced by organizations outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels. Common grey literature...
View ArticleThe Voice For John Stuart Mill
The biggest winner from the referendum on the weekend is John Stuart Mill. There’s a strand of left-wing orthodoxy these days that deprecates free speech and brands opposing viewpoints as dangerous...
View ArticleMichael Polanyi in 1960 on Teilhard de Chardin on evolution
Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call....
View ArticleThe world of bullshit we’ve built: Reflections on a scene from Utopia
I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a...
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Escape from planet sensible: Stunning listening
Adolf never had much time for planet sensible. Here he is after the Reichstag fire with fellow traveller Sefton Delmer who was Berlin correspondent for the “Daily Express” from 1928 to 1933, To the...
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Alasdair MacIntyre on how ethically lost we are
A young Mondrian in 1908 channels an old Monet but is really thinking “I wonder if a bunch of rectangles on canvas would sell? If it did it could solve a lot of problems, perhaps not for everyone, but...
View ArticleSome philosophy is probably fraud; let’s try to find it
If scientific fraud represents five per cent of scientific papers, we might well expect that we have a great deal of philosophic fraud as well. But in philosophy, how can we detect the fraudsters? For...
View ArticleMime, misdirection and pyramid of code
The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief...
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